Redeemer Family,
Next week you are invited to participate in one of the most important days of the year in the life of our church. February 22 is Ash Wednesday and we will all gather to receive the sign of the cross in ashes on our foreheads. Strange as it may sound, we won’t wash off the ashes right away, we'll bear the dirty smudge right there on our faces the rest of the day.
Now, why do this? Why participate in an Ash Wednesday service?
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent: a time of penitence, fasting, and prayer, in preparation for the great feast of the resurrection.
The season of Lent began in the early days of the Church… The forty days refer to our Lord’s time of fasting in the wilderness; and since Sundays are never fast days, Ash Wednesday is the beginning of the Lenten Fast.
Throughout the Old Testament, ashes were used as a sign of sorrow and repentance. Christians have traditionally used ashes to indicate sorrow for our own sin and as a reminder that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Like Adam and Eve, we have disobeyed and rebelled against God, and are under the same judgment, “‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return’” (Genesis 3:19).
But as we are marked with ashes in the same manner that we were signed with the Cross at Baptism, we are also reminded of the life we share in Jesus Christ, the second Adam (Romans 5:17, 6:4). It is in this sure hope that we begin the journey of these forty days of Lent, that by hearing and answering our Savior’s call to repent, we may enter fully into the joyful celebration of his resurrection.*
Taking things one step further, the ashes serve as an urgent reminder of something that many of us have forgotten or chosen to ignore - our own mortality. Over the past years, as I have listened to you, listened to our culture, and listened to the Holy Spirit, I have heard how so many of us seem to struggle with the paradoxical denial-and-anxiety of death. We live as if we will not die (denial), but we also have a deep, inner terror of death (anxiety).
The Christian hope is an answer to the question of death; and there is nothing less compelling than an answer without a question. Get rid of the question and the answer will wither away on its own. Get rid of death—tuck it away in hospitals and nursing homes, remove death from our sight—and soon the hope of resurrection will lose its luster. The good news of the Gospel will hardly seem good or much like news. Without death, the Gospel just isn’t very interesting.
But the problem of death persists. Hidden or not, death comes for us all. Which means that, interesting or not, we need the Gospel. Therefore, we need to take a page out of the ancient church playbook and reclaim the spiritual discipline of Memento Mori. We must remember our death. We must keep our own deaths present before our eyes.
When we do this, the very opposite of what we fear will occur. In contemplating death, we fear that we will become depressed, morbid, unhappy, fearful people. However, as all who have practiced this will attest, the very opposite thing happens within us. When we hold both our death and the Gospel before our eyes, we become more joyful, more content, more grateful, more courageous people. This happens because, in contemplating our own death in light of the Gospel, we take our deepest terror and bring it up out of the darkness and into the light where Jesus can deal with it.
So, church family, do a strange thing and come to one of the Ash Wednesday Services: 6:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 5:30 p.m. Receive the ashes on your forehead and remember your death.
Let’s undertake this uncomfortable, but necessary journey together through Lent so that, when we arrive at Easter, we will be ready to celebrate with authentic and enduring joy!
In the Father’s love,
